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Email Marketing Tips for the Small- to Mid-Sized Business

Are you looking for email marketing tips to help you grow your business? If so, you’ve come to the right place. Successful email campaigns can reduce customer churn, improve customer satisfaction and increase your marketing ROI.

A quick tour of the internet offers plenty of blog posts with email marketing tips. Some of the posts I’ve researched have old or outdated information. But many organizations, such as the Email Stat Center, SilverPop and AWeber offer a great deal of email marketing advice and information.

Successful Email Campaigns. When it comes to designing an email marketing campaign, remember that many consumers are checking their emails from their smartphones. In fact, according to e-Dialog, 34% of consumers check email on their mobile device at least once a day and 21% check email on their mobile device more than once a day.

Let’s kick things off with one of the best email marketing tips I can offer — only send emails to people who have opted-in to receive them. In the old days, businesses could skirt around this issue with some sketchy tactics that grew their email databases quickly. But most people have grown weary of those tactics, so many businesses (including the 60 Second Marketer) require new subscribers to double opt-in in order to receive email campaigns.

If you don’t use the opt-in or double opt-in method, people who receive your emails will put them in their junk folder. If enough people do that, you’ll be blacklisted by the internet service providers, which vastly reduces the number of your emails that get delivered. That can really hamper your ability to do business with new prospects, so in the end, it’s always better to use the opt-in or double-opt-in process required by all legitimate email service providers.

With that in mind, what follows are some of the top email marketing tips I’ve come across in my research:

Grow Your List by Simplifying the Sign-Up Process: Most successful email campaigns make the sign-up process very simple by requiring the completion of only one or two fields in order to begin receiving emails. That said, some companies (like HubSpot) have found that including multiple fields in the sign-up process is the best way to drive qualified leads to their sales force. In other words, their goal is to provide detailed information about their prospects prior to having their salespeople conduct a follow-up call. If you’re a B2B company selling something via salespeople, this approach may work for you. But if you’re a company that’s simply interested in providing ways to engage prospects or existing customers, then a simple 2- or 3-field registration form is enough.

Reduce Unsubscribes by Telling People What to Expect. When people sign-up for the 60 Second Marketer e-newsletter, they receive an email that explains what to expect. Successful email campaigns tell new subscribers three key things — how frequently they’ll be receiving communications from you, how to contact you, and what additional resources they receive in return for being a subscriber. (For example, our new subscribers receive a 20% discount off of our 60 Second University course.)

Improve Open Rate by Designing for the Preview Pane. Successful email campaigns are designed so that the reader can scan the information in their preview panes. If they like what they see, they can click to open and read the rest of the email. According to AWeber, up to 80% of your subscribers will first see their emails in a preview pane, so design them to be viewed and scanned easily via the preview pane.

Increase Conversion by Using Your Re-Targeting Feature. A good email marketing campaign uses re-targeting to increase conversions. What do I mean by that? When you deploy your emails, you can see who opened and who clicked through. Pe0ple who click through on your email are indicating that they have a high degree of interest in whatever it is you’re selling. By sending a follow-up email specifically targeting the people who clicked through, you can increase your conversion rate. A better conversion rate means more revenue. That’s a good thing.

Use Segmentation to Improve Conversion Rates. The more individualized your email marketing campaign, the better your chances are for success. In fact, one study showed that including a subscriber’s geographic location in the subject line can increase the open rate by as much as 24%. HubSpot requires a number of fields to be filled out in order to receive their information. That way, they segment their lists, personalize their follow-up messages and increase their conversion rates.

Improve ROI by Testing Your Way to Success. If you want to improve the results of your email marketing campaign, the best advice we can offer is to test your way to success. We talk about A/B Split Testing in a very popular post called 19 Insanely Simple Landing Page Tricks You Can Use to Convert More Customers, but suffice it to say that the most successful email marketing campaigns are the ones that test their results and continuously try to improve upon them.

Compare Your Results to Industry Benchmarks. It’s important to understand how you compare to others. For example, according to a study from Silverpop, email open rates averaged 19.9%–down from a 2009 average of 21.3%. Click-through rates averaged 5.4%–up from a 2009 average of 4.5%. Unsubscribe rates averaged 0.27%. (Nonprofits saw the lowest unsubscribe rate, at 0.10%.) Remember — these are averages for a wide variety of industries. The best way to compare your email marketing campaign is to use results from your specific industry. That way, you’ll be comparing apples to apples.

Improve Your Email Marketing Campaign by Subscribing to Competitor’s Emails. There’s nothing wrong with borrowing ideas from your competitors, so subscribe to their emails. Study what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong. Then, toss out the bad stuff and use the good stuff for your own campaigns.

I hope you find these email marketing tips helpful. Want some additional information? Then check out the 60-second video below called 3 Email Myths Busted (also available on the 60 Second Marketer YouTube channel).

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